Review: Infection:Zombies - Play As A Zombie
by Staff Writer
July 1, 2010
Overview
There are so many zombie games in the App Store, that Apple made a special applist just with zombie games. Infection:Zombies is one of the newest additions to the App Store that is currently in the Top 25 paid apps. The game switches up the typical zombie game where you play as a zombie rather than the other way around.
There are so many games where you blast away waves and waves of zombies. With Infection:Zombies you play as a zombie, and your goal is to infect all of the humans. It’s a definite change of pace premise, as you begin with a load of humans on screen, but soon you will have a load of zombies going after the last remaining humans.
Features
The game features three gameplay modes with a campaign, survival, and blitz. Campaign mode is composed of 50 levels, and once you’re half way through you unlock survival and blitz. Survival mode is simply to last as long as you can, and blitz mode has you trying to score as much as possible in the time limit.
You control your zombie with tilt or a virtual joystick, and you simply just run your zombie into a human. It instantly starts snacking, and you can choose to tap a button to release them infected, or devour the whole body. There are seven abilities including, health, armor, speed, and damage and you can level up each one 30 times. Online high scores and achievements are included via OpenFeint.
The Good
Right at the beginning you’ll notice the theme that flips the traditional zombie game on its head. It’s a refreshing twist playing as the zombie with a simple goal of eating brains, and making more zombies. There’s also a great gameplay mechanic to go along with this fantastic theme.
The game is simple to use with just a tilt or twitch of your thumb to move your zombie around touching as many people as you can. The difficulty arises in the new more powerful humans that arise with 20 variations in total. Soon you'll have to take a beating or try to distract guys with baseball bats, chainsaws, or lawnmowers, football players, cops, soldiers, special agents, ninjas, and more.
Every level requires a certain strategy simply because you can't infect all the humans on your own. You need to start with the weaker ones, and work your way up to the more powerful humans. As you go you'll have a bigger base of fellow zombies to gang up on tougher humans to finally transform them as well. The game is all about infecting as many humans as possible because the more you infect the less you have to do as the rest of the zombies are plenty hungry.
The campaign mode is plenty of fun as you have to make it through 50 different stages, and you need to upgrade your attributes along the way. You earn money for those upgrades based on the combo you can achieve in the level. The combo comes from bites on humans consecutively.
If the campaign mode wasn't enough to make it well worth your money there is a complex survival mode. Rather than starting slow, and working your way up you start in the thick of it battling all kinds of difficult humans, and you can upgrade all your attributes to level 15. Finally blitz mode may provide the most fun as you can play it in short bursts again starting at a very difficult stage, and going for the biggest combo you can in limited time.
Just playing the modes offers tons of fun, and plenty of incentive to replay. You can also go for the online high score tables for each of the modes, and there are lots of achievements. The game is very fast paced as once the infection starts it spreads rapidly, and it's plenty of fun for short bursts or extended periods of time.
The art style of the zombies and humans is fun and cartoonish to add to the amusement of the premise. The animations are funny as well whether it's infecting humans, or seeing them fight back against you or the other zombies. The engine is really well done to allow for a ton of action on screen with it handling 150 characters in a small space without a stutter.
The Bad
The game is somewhat basic and repetitive. The levels meld together with the same objective of infecting all the humans with always the same sized level. All you have to do is walk up to a human, and they're infected, and once you get enough zombies you don't really need to do anything for level victory.
There are no boss battles or special levels, so the entire campaign mode doesn't offer much variation. It's definitely fun, but does get stale after awhile with such a lack in variability. Once you've played a few levels you've seen all there is to see. It would be nice if the humans could have a vaccine to reverse the infection, and then you need to infect those special humans.
The Verdict
Infection:Zombies provides a humorous genre switching premise with a solid gameplay mechanic. It's simple fast paced fun that anyone can enjoy and provides some strategy while still calling on quick response time. There is plenty to do in the game though the mechanic gets repetitive after awhile which is a sad state for many iPhone games.
Infection:Zombies is a should buy for only $0.99 that once you start playing you'll be infected with fun.
